No snow day throws University of Illinois students into a racist hissy fit

When University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Chancellor Phyllis Wise told students that school would still be open despite zero-degree temperatures, all Hell broke loose.

U of I Urbana-Champaign campus remained open causing Twitter firestorm. (WGN-TV)

Several loud members of the 40,000-odd student body took to Twitter to vent their frustrations at Wise about the lack of a snow day because apparently no one at UI has ever heard of just skipping school.

A crude hashtag #f***phyllis soon emerged with plenty of attached racist, sexist and threatening messages attached. A Change.org petition was also started to get Wise to shut the school down.

Despite the firestorm, the school remained open. University officials told the Chicago Tribune that they deemed the social media outrage as a “free speech issue” and not an actual threat. Several of the accounts that sent out offensive tweets have since taken themselves down.

“They wanted to be a little sassy and impress close friends and didn’t think about the fact that this would have a little more visibility than that,” university spokesperson Robin Kaler said. “They said things in a very inappropriate way and very public setting.”